Translated material
Powder of happiness
Lyubov Polishchuk, Sergei Tsigal
It is simply impossible to understand how our ancestors managed to create a great European civilization without cocoa.
It is simply impossible to understand how our ancestors managed to create a great European civilization without cocoa.
(Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )
Long gone are the days when citizens made “Truffles” at home in the kitchen. They required scarce products: sugar, butter, cocoa, etc., but it was impossible to get the candies themselves at all. By the way, around the same period, people mastered the progressive technology of brewing moonshine from such peaceful products as kefir, peas and tomato paste. Nowadays everything can be bought in a store, so it’s even boring. True, Lyuba says that the candies are no longer the same, and in Leningradka, near the Bolshevichka factory, there is no longer the previous smell of vanilla and chocolate - apparently they are saving money. Don’t take this as senile grumbling, but during my childhood, “Stolichnye” was positively oozing with cognac, not like today. True, “Truffles”, soufflé, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Grillage” remained the same. In any case, these are real candies, and not all sorts of Snickers, Mars or Bounty. Once I took my daughter to the clinic for a procedure. I didn’t have time to have breakfast and, while I was waiting for her on the street, out of hunger (and, of course, advertising played a role) I bought a Mars and a Snickers bar each and immediately crushed them. Ten minutes later I no longer wanted to live. I felt sick, dizzy, and my hands were shaking. And young people gobble up this “delicacy” on both cheeks, and it does not harm them in any way. Unhappy people are not accustomed to good things. And most importantly, we are sincerely confident that these bars (covered with a thick layer of supposedly chocolate) are much tastier than some of our old-fashioned “Grilyazh”.
During the war, chocolate came to Russia exclusively from America. It was intended for the army, mainly for flight personnel. Those who had the chance to try this product recall that it was completely bitter.
One day a chocolate king from Europe and his wife came to our house. It seems that his father was supposed to paint his portrait. Naturally, he treated us to his chocolate. Everyone had the same reaction: “How bitter!” The king remarked, not without malice: “Of course, he’s real.” Apparently, he did not include ours, then still Soviet, in this category.
For some time now, Lyuba and I started making cocoa in the morning. Not some exotic cola-cao, which is consumed by animated characters living in a rectangular box with a blue screen, but ours - in a cardboard box familiar from childhood. If you follow the instructions and brew it with pure milk, it turns out very fatty, better half and half with water. Mom believes that the most delicious cocoa is obtained if you grate chocolate and brew it with boiling milk, without any water.
Imagine an early January morning, it’s still dark and very cold outside. You need to get up and go to work. You jump out of your warm bed and rush to the kitchen. You grind the grater, boil the milk, put it all on a tray and back to your bed. You put the pillow higher, place the tray on top of the blanket and sip hot chocolate with pleasure, like a real Hollywood star.
A piece of chocolate cake goes very well with a cup of good cocoa. Not in the morning, too many calories. This cake or rather a cake called "Heap" is made like this.
Ingredients for the cakes: 2 eggs, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 200 g sour cream, 2 teaspoons soda, one and a half cups flour. Quench the soda with vinegar or citric acid, mix everything until a homogeneous mass is obtained. Place one third of it in a frying pan and bake the crust. Add a tablespoon of cocoa to the remaining mixture and bake a second cake, a larger chocolate one.
Mix, but do not beat with a mixer, 600 g of sour cream with 3/4 cup of granulated sugar.
Soak the white cake with alcoholic syrup. A quarter glass of cognac or vodka, maybe wine, plus a tablespoon of granulated sugar. Sometimes, when I get carried away, I pour in as much as half a glass of cognac and, I assure you, the quality of the final product only improves.
Place sour cream on white crust. There is a lot of it, so we spread it generously. The black cake must be cooled and cut into small squares. If you make a mistake and end up with rectangles, it doesn’t matter. Each of these chocolate-colored geometric figures should be dipped in sour cream and placed - as it turns out, even in a pile - on a white cake layer. Accordingly, the frying pan or mold should have a high side.
Then mix 3 tablespoons of cocoa with 3 tablespoons of sugar and 4 tablespoons of milk, put on fire and stir without bringing to a boil. Add 100 g of butter there. Pour the resulting mass onto the cake structure and, after allowing it to cool, put it in the refrigerator, preferably overnight.
In the morning you open the door and see your chilled masterpiece, which only dreams of how to quickly get on the table.
It’s good to make such a cake for a child’s birthday. Recently, daughter Masha blew out sixteen candles on it and can now be considered a fully grown person.
We encountered some difficulties when we decided to please our old friend, who turned 54, with a chocolate cake. We baked everything in advance, cooled it and stuck candles. We arrived at the place safely, went up to the sixth floor and then decided that it would be more impressive if we lit candles on the stairs. We sat down on the window sill near the elevator and began flicking the lighter. Things moved slowly due to a draft that blew out the candles and the lighter. In addition, Lyuba set fire to those that stuck out from the edge. After which the path to the candles stuck in the middle was cut off, and I lit them with my already charred hand. Exactly at this moment, the first candle began to burn out and drown in the melted cream. But still, our appearance was very spectacular, and the birthday boy managed to blow out all 54 candles. The wax was then successfully picked out and the pie was eaten. Everyone admired it. I didn’t have time to try it - I was licking my burnt hand.
Even Lyuba, who is indifferent to sweets, sometimes indulges in chocolate cake. True, she prefers it performed by my sister Lena, who has long been sharpening her teeth on me for the fact that I published almost all the recipes from her treasured notebook. But there is still something left...